OBAMA NOMINATES U.S. ATTORNEY WHO LED SHOW TRIAL AGAINST IMMIGRANTS

NY Times - Eleventh-hour criticism is arising over President Obama's nomination for United States attorney in northern Iowa of a prosecutor who had a leading role in the criminal cases against hundreds of illegal immigrants arrested in a May 2008 raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. . .

Those cases, the broadest use to date of tough criminal charges against immigrants caught working without authorization, were emblems of a crackdown on illegal immigration by the Bush administration.

Some defense and immigration lawyers have said that felony identity-theft charges against the immigrants were excessively harsh, that immigration lawyers were not given adequate access to their clients, and that improper contact took place between prosecutors and one judge. They contend that possible civil rights and ethical violations by prosecutors should have been investigated.

"Does she stand by those tactics?" asked David Leopold, the president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the national immigration bar. "Would she engage again in this type of prosecution of scores of undocumented workers guilty of nothing more than civil immigration violations?"

The immigration lawyers' association has not taken an official position on the nomination.